Berry, M. W. and K. S. Minser. 1997. Distributed Land-Cover Change Simulation
Using PVM and MPI. Proceedings of the
USGS Land Use
Modeling Workshop, Sioux Falls, SD, June 1997. Also appears as
Technical Report No. CS-97-356, University of Tennessee,
Department of Computer Science, February 1997.
The MPI-based implementations of pLUCAS
offers a distributed solution to computational demands
of stochastic simulation on a network of workstations.
pLUCAS is a parallel version of the Land Use Change
Analysis System (LUCAS) which allows replicates of
land use scenario simulations to be scheduled on a
network of independent workstations.
Targeting distributed computational
environments reflects the resources available to most land-use
planners, forestry personnel, and wildlife managers.
This paper presents a concise performance evaluation of
2 pLUCAS distributed models on an ATM-based
network of 12 SUN Ultra-2 workstations. Speedups on the order
7.8 (using this network) have been obtained for certain MPI
(Message Passing Interface) versions
over the serial LUCAS implementation for selected watershed regions.
MPI
has become the de-facto standard message-passing
environment for distributed computation on networks of heterogeneous
computers.
Ongoing software development of the pLUCAS prototype includes the
porting of the MPI implementations to a recently acquired
IBM SP-2 multiprocessor system (having 40 computational nodes)
by the University of Tennessee.